Time’s up for the Yes2Rail blog, which I launched on June 30, 2008 as a paid consultant on Honolulu's elevated rail project. Yes2Rail’s August 13, 2012 post was its last following the author's move to Sacramento, CA. You’re invited to read four-plus years of information-packed entries, many of which are linked at our “aggregation site.” Look for the paragraph with red copy in the right-hand column, below. Mahalo for all the positive comments Yes2Rail received since its start.

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

The Countdown Has Begun (see above), so We’re Bringing Back a Few Yes2Rail Posts this Week To Highlight Big Honolulu Rail-Related Issues, Starting with CONGESTION, Plus: Another Sketchy Public Opinion Survey

You have to hand it to Cliff
Slater. He’s managed to position rail as a future failure if traffic congestion
will be worse after rail is built than it is today. What a snake oil salesman!

Of course congestion will be worse in the future than it is
today! Will people stop moving here? Will families stop having babies? Will the
long-extinct volcanoes that created Oahu miraculously start pumping more
lava that can be paved over with new highway lanes? Would the public even tolerate more lanes?

No to all those questions, but even the
media have been suckered by Mr. Slater’s pitch – giving him a free pass on his
manipulative, deceptive anti-rail messaging. You’ll look in vain if you search
the local media for even one tough interview that forced him to defend his
talking points.

We’re going to spend the
final week of Yes2Rail’s connection to the rail project by linking to earlier
posts here that help put the Slater anti-public transit machine into perspective. Maybe we can
create a critical mass in the doing that will give a few reporters reason to
start asking those questions – if not this week, then over the next three months..

Failure to Nip in the Bud

The congestion issue is where to begin.John
Temple, the former Civil Beat
editor who has moved on to the Washington Post, had a chance to stand fast against the Slater sales
pitch back in July 2010, not long after Civil Beat’s launch.

Mr. Temple’s July 12, 2010 piece on his interview a few days earlier with Mr. Slater has a deferential
tone to it, with no evidence in the three video segments posted that day of any
push-back by the seasoned journalist.

For example, here’s the
revealing content of the third video segment:

“Well, first off we have
to understand that we have a traffic congestion problem. We don’t have a public
transportation problem, OK. We need to firmly address reducing traffic
congestion in the future as one of – if not the primary – functions of any
new proposals. And there are various tools that we could use. Rail is not one
of them. It has not reduced traffic congestion anywhere, and we can spend 5 point 5
billion dollars a lot more wisely than merely on the rail line (emphasis added)."

That’s an extraordinary
quote that went unchallenged at the time by Mr. Temple and has skated by
unchallenged, as far as we can tell, by all other journalists in Honolulu. Only
rail supporters have managed to say, “Hold on, Cliff. You’re asking rail to do
something no transportation project can do – put a lid on congestion’s growth
over the next two decades to keep it at today’s level. Rail can’t do it, and
neither can buses or your high-occupancy toll roads!”

That would have been a reasonable response from Mr.
Temple, but there was no pushback on that statement or the others Mr. Slater
floated past Civil Beat’s
editor:

• “Why pay more when we can
get the same service for less?”

Pushback Missed: Says who?
What evidence did Mr. Slater have to suggest “the same service” could be
achieved for less money? How could any alternative that operates in shared road
space – contending with cross traffic at intersections, the daily traffic
build-up, the whole lot of it – provide the same level of service as
grade-separated rail transit? Mr. Slater wasn’t pressed to defend that
statement.

• “It doesn’t take too much
of a businessman to say this is a waste of money.”

Pushback Missed: Was Mr.
Slater saying rail is a total waste of money? Did he know what rail’s goals
are? How would whatever alternative he alluded to be a better expenditure?

• “These folks on the Ewa
plane (sic) need some traffic relief. Nothing that’s being proposed is going to
give them that.”

Pushback Missed: Would Mr.
Slater have conceded that people who ride the train will get total traffic
relief? That being the obvious truth of the matter, it appears obvious that
what he wants is absolute traffic reductions for the driving public. Is that
it?

• “My sense of it is that
people are becoming a lot more aware of the disconnect between the amount of
money that is going to go into this thing and the supposed benefits we’re going
to get from it.”

Pushback Missed: The city is
clear about rail’s benefits. What Mr. Slater seems to be doing is rewriting the
benefits to include a presumed reduction in traffic. The city doesn’t claim
congestion reduction as a future benefit – just a reduction in congestion’s
rate of growth. What the city does say is that rail will be a congestion-free,
non-highway option to commute that doesn’t now exist.

• “We need to address the
traffic congestion problem, not the public transportation problem. We need to
use tools to address congestion. Rail is not one of them.”

Pushback Missed: So if it’s
traffic congestion Mr. Slater wants to reduce, why hasn’t he gathered up a
coalition of like-minded traffic haters and proposed a congestion-reducing
transportation option to the Oahu Metropolitan Planning Organization, the City Council,
the State Legislature? He’s obviously trying to kill rail because it won’t
accomplish hisgoals and won’t be satisfied unless congestion
actually is reduced. But that’s not possible with a growing population, so Mr.
Temple's missed pushback is so obvious that it’s hard to imagine how he could have.

Other Possibilities

Mr. Temple didn’t push back
in any way, based on the reporting of this interview, which had this somewhat
bizarre final sentence in Mr. Temple's article: “The question in the end will be whether we’ll thank
him for standing firm”– which seems
to presume a failed rail project -- “or blame him for preventing a giant new addition that could
transform the look and feel of a significant part of Honolulu"– again, a presumption that rail won’t be built.

What about blaming him for
preventing rail’s construction two decades ago? What about blaming him for the
delaying tactics, including a federal lawsuit to kill rail, that have added
to this current project’s costs?What about asking him to explain his thesis that traffic
congestion can be reduced if only we were to divert the money going into rail
and put it somewhere else?

This Blog’s Pushback

Yes2Rail took immediate
notice of this interview and began posting about it the very first day it appeared at Civil Beat. Our July 12
post was headlined Cliff Slater’s ‘Ace Card’ Turns Out To Be a Joker; the flaw in his major talking point seemed so obvious
that we could barely take him seriously:

“Without the rail
alternative in (Chicago, Paris, New York and San Francisco) and other cities
around the world, congestion would be even worse than it is today, and there
would be no commuting alternative to sitting in traffic congestion.”

In talking to groups
about rail, I tell them that there’s really two things you need to know about
it. Number one, it’s gonna cost five and one-half billion dollars before cost
overruns, and the second thing is that traffic congestion with rail in the
future will be worse than it is today. And then I ask them if they have any
questions, and that kinda sums up the whole argument.”

Really? The whole argument?
It seemed preposterous then and still does that such a shallow pitch could
actually succeed, yet we’ve seen it happen before audiences pre-disposed to
oppose the rail project, like many members in a Rotary Club of Honolulu audience last
year. We wrote:

“Mr. Slater apparently
believes diverting all $5.5 billion intended for Honolulu rail will decrease
congestion. That’s the only possible
inference from his position. Yet in holding fast to that assertion, Mr.
Slater stands apart from virtually all professional assessmenets of Oahu’s
transportation future conducted by an army of transit and traffic experts.

“Yet that is what Mr.
Slater apparently believes – that despite more than a 20-percent increase in
Oahu’s population, his plan can reduce highway congestion and hours of delay by
2030. Objective assessments suggest he’s flat wrong, and we will continue to
publicize his 'whole argument' to expose its obvious weakness.”

“No kidding, in the
future, traffic congestion will be greater than it is today. I don’t think
that’s any earth-shattering news. I think what the difference is, is that
without the rail in the future, traffic congestion will be much worse than with
the rail, and I think that’s the whole point of the discussion would be. It’s
not appropriate to compare what the future is with rai and what it is now, but
it is to compare what the future would be with or without rail. That’s the
comparison that should be asked, and that’s not what Cliff Slater was just
talking about.”

Yes2Rail kept pushing even
as Honolulu’s media were backing away from examining the Obfuscator in Chief’s
dubious tactics:

Cliff Slater has been mentioned here at
Yes2Rail (a total of 801 posts counting today's) more than anyone else for good reason: He’s more
responsible than anyone else for public transportation’s rough going since at
least 1990 and possibly earlier. It happened to the Fasi Administration’s
project 20 years ago, and it’s happening again today.

As we’ve shown over the
years, Mr. Slater relies on misinformation and twisted logic in his campaign
against rail, and he relies on something else, too – government’s inability and
or unwillingness to mount a serious response to his efforts.

We’ll be watching closely
beyond next Monday, our last day as a consultant on rail, to
see if anyone steps up to challenge Mr. Slater’s rhetoric and those he has
propelled to prominence in the anti-rail fight. Mr. Slater’s own words have
supplied the ammunition.

Civil Beat’s Latest Poll

We’ll know Saturday whether
the news media’s opinion surveys were accurate or wildly off the mark. UH
professor Neal Milner last week agreed with our criticism of surveys that ignore the
opinions of citizens who are not likely voters – both the Civil Beat and the Star-Advertiser/Hawaii News Now poll did that – but are more likely than voters to rely on public transit.

Nevertheless, Dr. Milner said
the voter-only surveys do help predict the results of candidate races. But we have to wonder about Civil
Beat’slatest poll that concludes the anti-rail mayoral candidate could avoid a runoff in Saturday's vote. Here’s the
significant paragraph about the poll's methodology:

“Civil
Beat's survey sample has 80 percent age 50 or older (emphasis added). Cayetano does worst among
younger voters, with 46 percent of those in their 30s and 33 percent of those
between 18 and 29 years old. If more young voters turn out than have
historically, it would spell trouble for him. The recent Hawaii Poll sponsored by Hawaii News Now and
the Honolulu Star-Advertiser had only 48 percent of voters aged 55 or older,
and found Cayetano's overall support at 44 percent.”

That
80-percent figure is enough to question the
methodology and therefore the results. Maybe the pollsters know snake oil, too.

This Isn't Political

Yes2Rail is a blog about the Honolulu rail transit project, which has become the key issue in this year’s mayoral race. We comment on the candidates’ plans to address Oahu’s growing congestion problem and whether those plans could meet the need as well as elevated rail can and will. That’s not the same as criticizing the candidates, and we urge our readers to recognize the difference.

Another red-light runner meets Denver at-grade train, 6.13.12

Honolulu rail will be elevated, with zero possibility for accidents like those shown in this column in cities with at-grade systems. Visit our "aggregation site" for much more on why elevated rail is the only reasonable way to build Honolulu rail.

What riding the train will avoid

Bus Accident Aftermath on H-1

'Black Tuesday'--9/5/06 Crash Produced Nightmare Commute

Typical H-1 Traffic

About Me

After five years of active-duty service as an Army officer with duty stations in West Berlin and South Vietnam, reported and edited for newspapers and broadcast stations (including all-news radio) in Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and Honolulu. Covered Honolulu city government for the Honolulu Advertiser and KGMB-TV. Served on Congressman Cec Heftel's staff in Honolulu and Washington, then managed corporate communications and was Hawaiian Electric Company's spokesman for nearly a decade. A communications consultant for 19 years before moving to California in 2012. Launched, produced and hosted Hawaii Public Radio's "live" weekly "Energy Futures" public affairs program in 2009-10. Authored books on The National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific ("Punchbowl" 1982) and on the decline of standard grammar in business and society ("Me and Him Are Killing English!" 2007). Now an information officer with the California Department of Water Resources.